Solid State Drive Technology

Unity’s advanced technology and manufacturing process controls result in highly reliable, ultra-fast and secured SSD and flash hard drives modules for customers with different needs, especially in industrial, enterprise and special computing applications. Some major advanced technologies implemented in Unity's solid state drive include:

1. Wear Leveling Technology

NAND flash has individually erasable blocks, each of which can be put through a finite number of erase cycles before becoming unreliable. That is, after a specific number of cycles for each block, the error rate can significantly increase. Unfortunately, in most cases, the flash media is not used evenly. In certain areas, such as for the file system, the data is updated more frequently than for other areas, and will wear out sooner in those areas. Wear leveling mitigates this issue by arranging data so that erasures and re-writes are distributed evenly across the entire device. Thus, no single sector prematurely fails due to a high concentration of program/erase cycles. Unity uses an advanced wear leveling algorithm, which can efficiently spread usage throughout the entire flash media area. By implementing both dynamic and static wear leveling algorithms, the life expectancy of the flash media can be improved significantly.

2. Error Detection / Correction

Unity's solid state drives implement the BCH ECC Algorithm which is one of the most powerful ECC algorithms in the industry. This algorithm can correct up to 12 random bit errors in each 512 byte area.

3. Bad Block Management

Bad blocks are blocks that contain one or more bits for which the reliability is not guaranteed. Bad blocks can occur when the flash is shipped or can develop during the usage. Unity implements an efficient bad block management algorithm into the solid state hard drive to detect factory produced bad blocks as well as those that develop over the lifetime of the device. This process is completely transparent to the user through the use of S.M.A.R.T. command tools, i.e., the user will not be aware of the existence of the bad blocks during operation.

4. S.M.A.R.T. Technology

S.M.A.R.T. stands for Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology. S.M.A.R.T. was developed by a number of major hard disk drive manufacturers to increase the reliability of hard drives. This technology enables the PC to predict the future failure of hard disk drives. S.M.A.R.T. has become an industry standard for hard drive manufacturers, and now S.M.A.R.T. has also been incorporated into Unity's SSDs. Through the S.M.A.R.T. system, our solid state disk incorporates a suite of advanced diagnostics that monitor the internal operation of the drive and provide an early warning for many types of potential problems. When a potential problem is detected, the SSD can be repaired or replaced before any data is lost or damaged. S.M.A.R.T. monitors SSD performance, detects faulty sectors, performs recalibration and CRC error correction, etc. For more information on Unity’s S.M.A.R.T. implementation and command descriptions, please refer to our datasheet.

5. NCQ Technology

NCQ stands for Native Command Queuing technology. NCQ technology allows the drive to manage multiple outstanding commands more efficiently, which significantly increases concurrent access capability. It solves the concurrent access bottleneck associated with traditional HDDs in some high concurrent access applications such as IPTV and VOD. As part of the latest Serial ATA specification, NCQ requires an NCQ-capable SSD and either a motherboard or a PCI adapter card with NCQ support. NCQ technology is incorporated into select SSDs from Unity.

Since enterprise, industrial and mission critical applications require much more reliable devices than typical consumer products, a more sophisticated production management system is necessary to meet commercial and industrial customers' requirements. The key to providing reliable devices is a product traceability and failure analysis system. Unity's manufacturing systems are ISO9001 and ISO14001 certified. Our SSD products are FCC, CE, MIC, RoHS and UL certified. In addition, we also have implemented statistical process control and document control on the manufacturing floor together with monthly and quarterly internal audits that ensure a controlled quality environment to produce highly reliable products.

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